The Debt
by Team Bonet
Summary: To escape imprisonment at the bottom of the sea, Bill Turner chooses bondage aboard The Flying Dutchman. The price is one hundred years. But that is only half the price. Featuring Davy Jones, Jack Sparrow, and Barbossa.
1. Aboard the Flying Dutchman

**Time Frame**: The following story takes place before, during, and after the events of _Curse of the Black Pearl_, leading into _Dead Man's Chest_.

**Note**: As far as I've been able to determine, no official name for Bootstrap's wife has been released. Therefore, I have taken the liberty of given her one.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 1: <strong>_**Aboard the **_**Flying Dutchman**

Bill Turner was not surprised when he saw the ship sailing towards him along the bottom of the sea. A fish clung to his cheek, gnawing patiently at the flesh beneath his eye, and he had been dreaming. Philippa had just walked into the room. Must not have really needed anything, as she was gone almost as soon as he had raised his eyes in greeting. His fingers played across the edge of William's coverlet—Will, his own little Will, so healthy and new. Now in his arms. Now against Philippa's breast, and all three of them in the small, cramped dark grey house. Walking its two rooms—the bedroom, the kitchen, gazing out the window at the neighbours' brick wall.

Half-awake, he walked moss-sleek piers and pulled on the ropes of hundreds of ships. Back and forth, tighten the jib, raise the main mast, capture the wind. His hands skinned and callused and salty. In and out, like the tides that tugged at his hair and the drifting scraps of his coat. Everything grey and misted, silent and deep.

Jerked back into reality—ocean floor, hands tied, rusted heap of cannon to his right, barnacle crusted chain that led from the cannon to the straps of his boots—even as unreal things paraded behind his eyelids as if they had happened seconds ago.

A mutiny. His baby boy, picking him up, holding him close, forehead to warm forehead. The lingering touch of Philippa's fingers over his own. The island out at sea, receded now into a cloud-choked horizon, where his captain had been left to die with no boots and only one bullet.

Him left to die as well, not long after.

The hope that it might be today. The same hope, day after day.

The knowledge that he could not die. Could not summon death.

But he had.

Today, he had.

Stood before him now, like a nightmare from a child's book of faerie tales or the rum-soaked tales of sailors washed ashore, spared from wrecks and battle and the vast, gaping maw of a storm. A mass of translucent, writhing tentacles were both face and beard to a tall, time-worn man dressed in tatters like fine lace coral and reef beds. He blurred, shifted, faded in and out with the currents. And all the while he gazed down at Bill with keen, intelligent blue eyes.

Bill could not look away, even had he wanted to. Could not move for the tons of seawater that pinned him to the floor.

So he watched. Waited.

He was hauled aboard a rotting, filthy ship, gasping and heaving and nearly blind. Trawled from the depths, he was tossed on deck with no more fanfare than that of a fisherman shaking out his net. He dropped to the deck on all fours, coughed out water and water and more water. Shivered, gritted his teeth so they wouldn't shatter.

The hollow thud of a peg leg caught his ear. A thick, slurred voice, "William Turner, do ye fear death?"

He spat out the last of the salt water, wiped his mouth clean as best he could with a sodden sleeve. "It's _not _dying what's my problem," he rasped.

"So yer a man what can't die?"

In a flash, the ship's captain had dropped to one knee, eyes level with Bill's, his nearness a slap of aged, stagnant brine and things forgotten to fester in the dark. His tentacles shivered and contracted, then rose, slow, prodding. Took up Bill's chin and tilted his face, tentacle suckers popping and snapping as they felt their way. Searching. Reading.

Bill held his breath.

Could not drown.

But there were other ways to die.

The captain smiled, smacked his lips with an audible pop. "Do ye know who I am, Mr Turner? Do ye know whose ship has," and here the mirth in his voice reached his eyes, "saved ye?"

"Davy Jones," Bill said, labouring around the tentacle that pushed into his jaw. "The _Flying Dutchman_."

It couldn't be any other ship, any other captain. He had lain at the bottom of the sea, immortal and cursed and unable to die. If these things could happen in this world—to him, to the insignificance that was him—then the _Flying Dutchman_ couldn't be anything but real.

Jones nodded. "Aye." Withdrew his tentacles, pulled Bill to his feet as he rose. He drew a pipe from his coat pocket, clamped it between his lips even as other tentacles filled it up, tamped it down, hunted out matches and struck them. A brief, warm flare of colour, then thick grey smoke snaked and weaved out of Jones's mouth.

"Yer a cursed man, Mr Turner."

Bill said nothing.

"And this cursed state, I wonder, would it be—" Jones puffed on his pipe, a deep, wet sound "—related to a certain _captain_?" Bill blinked, twitched. Something involuntary, eyes darting sideways even as his brain tried to both hunt down and hide the name that flashed through his mind. Jones exhaled one luxuriant arabesque of smoke. "Ahh," he said. Drew closer to Bill. "Where _is _the little Jackie bird?" Puffed and exhaled as he waited for Bill to meet his eyes.

"Marooned," Bill said at length.

"HAH!"

Jones turned away in triumph. A crowd had gathered, a fact that Bill had—until then—only been vaguely aware of. Jones's crew were every bit as deformed as their captain. Huddled together, even making way for their captain as he strode across the deck, they resembled nothing so much as the seabed Bill had been lifted from—a teeming collection of half-formed men and fish, crabs, molluscs, sea urchins and mussels, anemones, starfish, suckers and flapping gills. They grunted and grinned as Jones paced, puffing on his pipe, tentacles rising, curling, and falling as he digested Bill's words. As he paced—the clump of his peg slowing, growing heavier—his mood of cruel delight began to fade. He turned on Bill.

"Marooned, ye say?" Cocked his head so that his tentacles slapped together in a flick of salt spray. "Soon to die?" When Bill said nothing, he turned away, lips pressed firmly together. "On _land_," he spat. He glared at Bill. "Ye _are_ a cursed man, Mr Turner, not least for knowin' that coward Sparrow. Ye _know _what I offer. Can ye _do_ it?"

"I'll do anything."

Jones drew back. As he considered Bill, eyes down to slits, his anger began to soften into a rueful craftiness. He glanced down at the sea as it lapped against the sides of his ship, chuckled. "Anything?" he said. "Anything to be free of the sea's embrace, of the weight of it, the crush of it?"

"Anything."

"Lucky for you, Mr Turner, all I ask is time and servitude. One hundred years aboard the _Dutchman_." He cocked his head, gave him a mocking smile. "We both know the tale."

The crew snickered. Looking from them to Jones, Bill felt something heavy drag at his heart. His insides were numb. He was not entirely a fool. He suspected a bargain struck with Jones was no bargain at all, and nothing that would benefit anyone but Jones. Even now, his mind foggy from captivity, he remembered Jack Sparrow and his odd tales. Tales about albatrosses providing rope for an escape, sea turtles that could push along a dingy caught in becalmed water, Persian princesses turned into mechanical peacocks, ghosts rattling bones and Davy Jones, pulling the _Black Pearl_ from the depths to present to Jack as a gift.

"Made me her captain, ole Davy did," Jack would say. Half the crew thought him barmy. The other half paid him no mind so long as there was treasure and rum and a port where both could be utterly spent.

And now Jack was without the _Pearl_, its crew cursed.

Such was the payoff for his bargain with Jones.

"We're waiting, Mr Turner," Jones said. "Surely ye don't expect us to wait ten more years for ye to make a simple decision?"

"Ten years...?" Bill muttered, thrown. "What—?"

"Not known fer yer mental faculties, then. 'Course, ye _were _cursed to the bottom of the sea. Hardly a position from which t'gather information." Jones stowed his pipe. "Ten years, Mr Turner. Ye've been layin' at the bottom of the sea for nigh on to ten years."

Bill staggered, caught the rail to steady himself. Laughter rang in his ears.

All that time... all that time...

And yet. The curse. Jones read him somehow, felt it. He was still cursed. Ten years on, and the blood debt on that accursed Aztec gold had still not been paid. And here was Davy Jones come to free him from the punishment to which Barbossa had doomed him. And Barbossa still cursed. A smile twitched across Bill's lips.

"I'll do it," he said. Looked straight at Jones. "One hundred years. Bound to your ship. Aye. I'll do it."

"And what do I get, hm?"

Bill frowned. "What...?"

"Certainly _not_ know fer yer mental faculties," Jones snapped. "What _are_ ye known fer, Mr Turner?"

"Loyalty," he said.

"Aye?" Laughter again, derisive and malicious, as the crew held on to Jones's every word, watched Bill cringe yet try to retain his dignity. Jones circled Bill, arms clasped behind his back. "Loyalty," he said, rolling the word in his mouth, the taste and weight of it. "And how did that work fer ye, last two captains?" Leaned in close, tentacles coming to rest on Bill's shoulder. "Loyalty put you at the bottom of the sea, Mr Turner. Left to die."

"And now part of this crew, sir. L-loyal."

Jones stepped back. He held Bill's gaze. Whatever he saw there, it was enough. For now, at least. He nodded. "Do not forget that, Mr Turner. Because _I _will not."

* * *

><p>Bill stood on the <em>Dutchman<em>'s deck, eyes closed, mind still, breathing in the sea.

The way Bill saw it, a body could get used to anything. Not just pain or physical reality, but everything processed through one's senses. Weight and quality of air, for one. The close claustrophobia of oxygen pulled in and spat out by thousands throughout the Port of London. The needles and pins of the sun out at sea, sat in a doldrum, sunlight like a heavy, heady second skin, pulsing across his pores.

A body could get used to sunlight again.

There was a weight to it, a colour, a taste. The leather and keratin of his own skin warming, the heavy, biting and filthy sweat of his crewmembers, and more—a something hard to pin down. Sunlight tasted of vast, immeasurable distance, of movement. He was not William Turner in sunlight—he was just one man, adrift upon a sea that swayed ever on and on and on.

Sunlight was violent and red, bursting orange, yellow and white when he closed his eyes. Kept his eyes closed, felt it—light and distance yet to travel—took a deep gulp of it again. Filled his lungs with it. Not dark, not the tonnage of cold vast deep water upon him, numbing and tasting of growth that signalled decay. Rot. Pungent. Living yet festering, squelching underfoot.

Not even the _Dutchman_ could cancel the urgent red of open skies behind his lids. It was—

"Look, mate. _Mate_? Look, I'm all fer standin' about an' all, but if ye don'move, someone's as goin'ter get beat. Likely _you_."

He stammered out an apology, even as he moved aside. Couldn't afford to let this keep happening. Had to work. Keep busy. Move the ship forward.

Forward and forward and forward.

Closed his eyes, one last breath of sunlight, before an overwhelming sense of water and darkness propelled him forward.

On its best day, the _Dutchman_ appeared to be made of nothing but water, a slithering, cold blanket that sank into the marrow of one's bones. It heaved and swelled and pushed them all forward in a scuttling, rushing mass to carry out the orders of the foreman, the bosun, and—on the dread occasions when he would emerge—Jones himself. And then it was movement and countermovement. Knots undone and all the hands to pull on the ropes, lines tied down and rigging secured and the thud of twenty feet or more on deck and all the salt in his mouth and water, water, water.

"Is no wonder we turn to fish, _hein_?" yelled a crewmember from across the yard arm, voice nearly lost in the crash of the waves. "Soon you sprout gills, you see!"

"How long does it take?" Bill hollered back. The man—face half-buried by a conch—laughed. Never a good sign.

"Some poor bastards keep count," said a crewman with lobster feelers. They twitched and clacked as he patched replacement shrouds. "Below deck. On th'bulkhead. Inside th'brig. Powder monkey still countin', th'poor bastard."

The powder monkey was a young man. New, from the looks of him—only a few coral bits like flared gills behind his ears, his forearms covered in patches of sea grass and algae. Nervous type. Jumpy. Bill felt calm and all but a master of the _Dutchman _on the rare occasions when their paths crossed. Saw him again a few times, rushed and irritable as he ran from cannon to cannon, igniting the fuses. Caught sight of him after a new ship had been sunk—new crewmembers had been put through the paces, bodies had been tossed into the sea, throats slit and skulls crushed, to meet the deaths they did not dare fear—muttering to himself as he scratched out one more day on the brig wall.

"Useless fool!" spat the bosun. Backhanded the boy back to his place below the quarter deck.

Bill stepped into the brig. There, on the wall, some fresh, some half-buried under barnacles and moss, were different collections of marks, scratches and words. Most he could read, others were in languages he had never seen, alphabets like little boxes or flowing lines and dots, curving and dipping. He ran his fingers across the wall, brushed off moss and fungi to read _2 yeers lord, jost 2 yeers. _Wondered if the unfortunate man had made it back to land.

A guttural laugh at his shoulder broke his pitying reverie. "Now _dere_ be a waste a'time." The speaker was tall, dreadlocked, teeth like tar. Most of his dreadlocks were now seaweed that clung to his cheeks and neck. "Don' bother none with dat, dis one. Is 'ere we come, is 'ere we die. None kin change dat true. Ya join' de _Dutchman_, ya pledge tah Davy Jones, ya kin be certain ya remain part of him crew." He fixed Bill with a steady, calculated stare—the shaman around the bonfire, conjuring the bogeyman and rattling his bones at the novices. "Part of da _ship_." He jerked his head to the left, seaweed dreadlocks joining in a wet, jilted clap. "Ya be _him_."

Him was an old, gnarled gentleman sitting on a barrel against the lower deck wall. He gripped a lantern in his left hand, propped against his ankle as he dozed, head bowed, a crest of fine coral growth radiating from either side of his head, almost like a halo. Bill approached him slowly, the dreadlocked crewman close behind him. The old man napped on, peacefully, seemingly unaware of anyone or anything around him.

"What does he do?" Bill said.

"Him? Nottin'. Him sit and hold dat light an' be none wot really needs it."

Barnacles and coral grew out of every part of the old man's body, so that, when viewed sideways, he seemed to not be there at all. A living figurehead. When he looked down, Bill could see that his feet had merged with the wood of the deck floor, so that his toes and ankles had warped and bulged into roots chocked with sweating, bright orange shelf fungi.

"Wyvern," the crewman said. "Is de reward o'years of service tah Davy Jones. Dem wot count down days an' years is worse dan 'opeless."

"How long has Wyvern been on that wall?" Bill said.

No answer came. The crewman had vanished.

Bill stared, cast his gaze into every corner of the room. Nothing. No sound or shadow or smell. Only Bill and Wyvern, the dim glow of the old man's lantern illuminating nothing.

A cry came from above, "MAN OVERBOARD!"

A thunder of feet, a jostled, violent commotion as every member of the crew clambered up or jumped down onto the deck. They rushed to the rails, some hanging off the shrouds or the sails. Bill found a place along the rail, pressed tight against it as other crewmembers pushed in closer. Lobster pincers bit into his lower back, his hair a tangled mess in his eyes as he squinted across thin sheets of rain.

"Who wus it?" someone yelled.

A man like a shelf of anemones pointed at the roiling sea. "Powder monkey!"

The boy surfaced and sank beneath the waves as he swam, his arms pale oars with no rhythm, only the blind desire to move—to get away.

"Swim lil'sea rat! Swim! Ye won't git far!"

Laughter rang out. Bill could only watch. The boy's arms broke the surface, sank again. His long, blond hair was plastered to his skull, the coral gills behind his ears broken. A shot rang out. Someone straddling the yard arm, aiming his musket at the struggling form. A second shot rang out. The boy disappeared to cheers and whistles. Only to reappear moments later, still swimming, blond head bobbing like a toy in the cresting waves.

"Someone git th'cannon!"

"Aye! Somebody get dah can—!"

"ENOUGH!"

The commotion died down to a rowdy simmer of mutters. A scuffle formed at the left end of the rails as crewmen pushed back and shoved others aside to give Jones a clear space. The foreman placed a spyglass in Jones's outstretched palm—almost human, Bill could see, but for one long, pale tentacle.

"He swims fast," Jones said. He snapped the spyglass shut. "Let him swim." He turned his face half-way, addressing the bosun, who had fought his way just behind Jones's right side. "A shame to let him swim alone, though."

A jolt passed through the crew at those words. It rattled and squelched and spat brine and it was contagious. It was excitement. Bill could feel it well from everyone around him. All eyes were on Jones and the bosun.

"Ya 'eard 'im!" the bosun called out. He shoved men away, unhooked the whip at his side. It whistled and cracked in the air. "Ring the call!"

A dark, guttural cheer erupted. Bill was knocked against the rail, blood in his mouth from where his lower jaw banged against wood. Heavy, pockmarked hands pushed him forward, until he found himself before the bosun. "One of the new guys, Jimmy Legs," said the crewman keeping a tight grip on Bill's shoulder.

Jimmy Legs spat. His piranha's jaw shifted and slid, needle teeth rasping and screeching across Bill's ears. The bosun thrust the butt end of his whip into Bill's stomach, scratched behind what remained of his ear as Bill doubled over, was hauled back upright by two crewmen. "Wot's yer name, ye gutless maggot?"

"Bill," he croaked. Coughed to clear his throat. "William Turner. Called Bootstrap."

The bosun backhanded him, grasped his ear to jerk his head straight. "Don't care _wot _ye was called." Shoved him back so that he nearly knocked the crewmen behind him down. "Turner," Jimmy Legs said. "That's all ye are 'ere. Now git 'im out of my sight! Set him at the wheel!"

"Sound the call!" the foreman shouted. "Captain's orders!"

Every voice took up the call. "Sound the call! Sound the call!" Bill found himself at a turning wheel, driven forward by the sting of the whip at his shoulders. Fabric ripped. The wheel turned. The crew chanted, low and rattling, like tremors rising from the deeps. "Sound the call. Sound the call." Flesh ripped. Blood splattered against the wheel. Bill cried out. Flesh ripped deeper. "Sound the call! _Sound_ the call!" He slipped on rain-slicked moss and slime, on the red of his own blood, righted himself quickly, the whip catching him even as he gripped the wheel spoke harder, continued to push.

Jones stood above it all, gazing out to sea.

The powder monkey was a sporadic burst of skeletal limbs and wet hair. Rose and fell. Rose and fell. The crew's chant followed the swelling and crashing of the waves.

"Sound the call! _Sound the call_!"

Jones lifted his right arm.

Jimmy Legs let out a roar. "RING THE DEATH KNELL, BOYS!"

Jones dropped his arm. He watched as the boy surfaced once more.

"Summon the Kraken," he said.


	2. Things the Way They Are and Were

**Note: **The scene at the very end of this chapter was what sparked this entire story. As I started writing on 28 September, it's somewhat strange that I finally wrote the scene on the night of 19 October. Took long enough...

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 2: <strong>_**Things the Way They Are and Were**_

Day passed into night, and night into days, days into weeks. The impossible began to fade into the mundane. Open sea, sailing, the work of trimming the sails and taking his turn at the wheel. It almost lulled Bill into a sense that one hundred years aboard the _Dutchman _might not be so terrible. A mug's game. And then—things simply can't remain simple, Bill mused—strange things began to happen.

The sight of his own bones under full moonlight, for starters, the first sight of which had startled the crew more than him. Bill stood back calmly from his place at the wheel as crewmen crossed themselves and muttered. He turned his arms this way and that, fascinated by the network of small, thin bones that made up his fingers, palm, right up to the larger bones of his arm. He slid his skeletal fingers between the gaps where muscle should be.

"So this is the Aztec curse," he murmured to himself. "Ten years on, and my bones picked clean."

Drew back what remained of his coat to consider, patiently and long—long enough for Jimmy Legs to yell at him to get his head out of the sand—the sight of his ribcage and the slick and glistening, dark, pulsing things inside it. Some of them looked shrivelled. Bill swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing up and down in his ruined throat. Shut his coat.

A little stranger than the sight of his own bones was the weird, illogical way his clothes were soggy tatters in the moonlight, yet full—albeit still soggy—fabric by day and darkness. Interesting, that. He thought the Aztec Gods had a rather perplexing sense of humour. Aboard the _Black Pearl_, wherever it might be, he reckoned Barbossa would be none too pleased at the sight of his precious captain's hat, moth-eaten, mouldy and pock-holed, its feather a sorry, twisted yellowed heap.

The laws governing cursed fabric, however, paled next to the physical laws of the _Dutchman_.

Diving took some getting used to. Anticipating it, knowing to hold on to the rigging or brace behind the quarter deck stairs. Walking off the shock of not floating, of stepping across a submerged deck as easily as he walked on land, footfalls slow and reverential, a comforting, childish joy breaking the monotony of work. And then, the violence of re-emerging, the sea and waves rushing up a bullet grey wall of thousands of pummelling fists, bodies dragged back. Bill braced himself, feet apart, grip tight on a mooring line, the limbs and outgrowths of the crew sliding, clawing, scratching slithering across him.

The crew. That was another one.

Every one of his senses had to get used to that singular oddity. The heavy, deep sea scent and stench of them, the heady decay of fish guts, oil and grease. The sight of puffer fish faces, lobster claws jammed into crab shells—and that one poor bastard with a wheel rammed through his shoulder blades, rotting and splintering into his flesh. They were glossy and slippery to the touch, squelched and cracked and popped when they walked, cold and dripping water and sickly pale and it made him shiver.

How long before he himself—?

Sooner than he feared.

Was already pale. Held at the bottom of the sea, no friendly ray of light. Bound to leech the colour from a man. What colour the curse did not take. Already grey and pasty like death. But now there was an odd smoothness about his skin, like pebbles at the shore. Pores. Hair. They receded, day by day, shrank or fell away as he rubbed his forearms. He could not get warm. Was always cold. Rubbing his palms together accomplished nothing. Winter chill seeped into his insides. Growths followed. A pale green line of soft mould behind his upper arm. It darkened, thickened, spread. Patches of tiny, silky organisms appeared on his jacket, above his right shoulder, bloomed into zooid colonies like rippling lettuce leaves. Ripped them off. Came back. Brought coral with them. He scrapped at his face in the morning and felt bumps. He tumbled off his hammock with a cry as a mollusc crawled out from behind his ear, burrowed into a tear in his coat's sleeve.

The others laughed at his panic.

"Say goodbye t'yer ugly mug, chum!"

"Cheer up, scumbucket, yer still d'prettiest one 'ere! In daylight, that is!"

"Still glad we hauled ya up?"

There was a mussel on his right cheek.

But he was longer trapped underwater. Aye, there was that.

Easier going then. Sometimes. Had almost grown accustomed to the weight of his new body—had steadied the waves of desperation as he passed from bones to barnacle covered palms—when he fell clear through the deck and down into—

—the brig.

For a long, winded while, he lay where he had dropped, huddled, matted hair in his eyes and tangled against cheeks and lips, breathing hard. At length, he looked above him. No trapdoor, no grate, no stairs. Zooid and barnacle crusted wood. Smooth, all in one piece. So he hadn't broken through. Had dropped. Straight down.

How in—?

"You're not hurt, then?"

Turned to find himself staring into the sunken, patient eyes of Wyvern.

"Aye," Bill muttered. Looked above him once more, then back at Wyvern. "What just happened?"

"Travelled across the ship. Across the marine life."

"Travelled across...?" Frowned in disbelief. "That makes no sense. Why would—?"

Wyvern leaned forward, forearms dropping to his knees, a wet, guttural rip following the detachment of barnacles, coral, lime and crustacean exoskeleton from the brig wall. "Part of the ship," he said. "And the ship a part of you."

The words followed Bill around for days, a trail of persistent crabs snapping at his thoughts. Part-_snap_-of-_snip_-the-snap _snap_-ship. Had heard it before. Was muttered, intoned, recited and spat out often with a near religious fervour. Behind the snip snap clack of this ship's mantra clattered and scuttled his own words. "How long has Wyvern been on that wall?"

Had to laugh, then.

Escape imprisonment, choose bondage, bond with the deck walls.

He set a flagon of rum in front of Wyvern one evening, below deck to escape both the sight of himself in moonlight and needless busywork at the rigging—courtesy of Jimmy Legs and his lover affair with shouting orders. Bill pulled the stopper out with his teeth, held out the flask to Wyvern.

"Do you drink?"

Wyvern cracked open one eye with a crinkle of salt. "Lack the hands, sir," he muttered. He raised his arms. One ended in an overgrowth of wood and moss that had welded his fingers together. The other had mutated so that the flesh lapped and overlapped over the rusted iron handle of his lantern. Wyvern looked at them forlornly, blinking rheumy eyes. "Lack the hands."

Bill humphed—whether in acknowledgement, pity, or both, he couldn't tell. He shoved back his coat, dug out the small knife the crew of the _Black Pearl_ had let him keep as they tossed him overboard. Cut a thin slice of wood, half a paper's length, off the cleanest bit of deck wall. Worked with the grain to roll it closed, tight, tighter, but wide enough to have entrance, exit, and a hollow space between. He dropped it into the flask, turned it so the tip came close to Wyvern's lips.

"Mmm," Wyvern rattled, eyes on the flask. "Like a reed," he rasped. "To breathe through."

"Lacks a bit of dignity," Bill said.

Wyvern nodded, creaking. "It'll do, sir."

They drank in silence, surrounded by the slow, rumbling groans of the ship, drips, the brittle, to and fro squeak and rattle of Wyvern's lantern, until the old man refused his turn at the flask and instead said, "Do you mind it anymore?"

"Which part?"

A pneumonic, gurgled laugh, then, "The smell."

"The crew?"

"Becomes part of you," Wyvern said, voice low and thoughtful. "You fight it. But you forget. Until you come to believe you always smelled of lichen, moss, rot and fungi." He cracked his head to look straight at Bill. "And fish, yes. Stagnant ocean. Pools filled with dying starfish and mollusc, clam, and fish, fish, fish."

Bill drank. He drank for both of them, taking two pulls at once. Didn't want to think about him and fish and the ship. So he drank, and with every pull he willed himself to shove back the thought of fish, fish, fish. Drank until there was nothing left. Tapped the flask's neck to his lips as he took in Wyvern, stooped, all but petrified, borderline senile, yet well-spoken enough.

"What were you," Bill said, "before you joined this crew? Surely there's more to you than..." Tailed off, eyes on Wyvern's lantern.

For a while—a long while, so that Bill had almost decided Wyvern had not heard—there was silence, punctuated by cracks like brittle paper as Wyvern's eyes roved along the deck floor. He stammered, bloodshot eyes not quite focusing on Bill.

"I... I forget."

"Gentleman," said the cook, when Bill at last put the question to someone in the crew. "As I understands it, he were some sort of learned type. Ain't that right, Bucket?"

Bucket, hunched at the other end of the kitchen, wedged into the dip formed by the curves of the ship's bow, flapped the limp anemone that served as his mouth. What emerged was a damp, sloppy sound the cook interpreted for Bill as, "Says he were a professor. Nature sciences, wotever that means." He dug into the side of his skull, pried and pulled until his hand resurfaced, fist closed tight over several squirming, translucent shrimp. He tossed all three into the simmering pot he was stirring. "Poor bugger."

"You knew him?" Bill said.

"Not rightly speakin', no. But I were there when Jones took his ship. Full of the lot of them, that ship were. Learned chaps. Half as died. The rest chose death. Wyvern, though, he were excited, see? The lot of _us_, eh? We be plenty nature!" He laughed, joined by a gurgle of bubbles Bill took to be Bucket laughing as well. "An now lookit him. Half-nature hisself—not much of a man."

"Aye," Bill murmured.

Not much of a man.

Not anymore.

* * *

><p>That night, curled into a corner of the lower deck where moonlight could not reach him, knees up to his chest and arms wrapped around his knees, he drifted in and out of half-sleep. Lost sense of wood below him, bodies above him, the cold and the incessant dripping of the ship. Sunk down into a grey still place, so that his hair was tugged by the currents of the deep once more, his mind jerking between ship and ocean floor and Philippa always just about to enter the room. His eyes shifting to catch her. Philippa turning around.<p>

And every time, he'd jerk awake to find himself on the wet, hard floor.

Philippa gone away from him.

Yet Mrs. Philippa Turner née Colville darted in and flicked out and through Bill's thoughts, caught in the currents of a moment's panic, the jolt and dazed emptiness that pricked him—occasionally, when not bone tired from pulling the _Dutchman _across, through and below the waters—with the realization of what he had actually done.

One hundred years.

Couldn't even fully fathom it.

Hundred. Had already lived fifty-two anniversaries of his birth.

Philippa flittered in and out, bright and blinding, like the glints and flickers of sunlight skipping between the waves. He tried to pick and choose the memories, at first. Her smell. Would've liked to summon what she smelled like. Something quiet and peaceful and pale yellow. But any concrete, lasting shred of her he tried to summon faded under the muck and the bilge water and the brine of the ship and its crew (and _you_, a rusted, quiet voice murmured, and you too). Only the idea of her scent remained. That she _had_ had one—that he had liked it. That it put him in mind of soft, buttery yellows.

No good. The sea swallowed even that.

Memories surfaced like flotsam, faded from his mind's view if he tried to focus, to grasp. Closeness. That they had lain together in bed. That her face had pressed close to his in the pale blue of the early morning. Small bed. Small, dark house. Cramped in between tall, skinny homes not far from the Thames, from the dock. Precious little sunlight, so that they huddled and pressed close together for warmth, her chin buried under a thick coverlet. Will swaddled in his cot beside their bed.

He remembered asking to place the boy between them, that last night, before he shipped out as a merchant seaman. Before Jack. When all that mattered was the warm yet flimsy weight of his son's fingers around his thumb.

"Such a wee thing."

His own fingers loomed in his sight, Will a quiet, almost translucent presence beyond. Breath in and out. He remembered a tightness in his chest, a hushed awe that squeezed at his heart. He knew the feeling. Knew it when he opened his eyes from dark disorientation of sleep and saw again the tangle of curls, the dip and drop of shoulders, hips and coverlet that was Philippa. Those moments made him heart-sore, that they could only exist as one instance, that he could not grasp them—live them—forever.

He wanted to remember a conversation. Anything would do.

She came through in silence.

Reading letters, the furrows on her brow as she disagreed with whatever her brother was writing about from Glasgow. The knot of her apron, the way he'd tie a rolling hitch knot, pull it loose at any moment just to tease her. Didn't always pay off.

Remembered the moss-crusted barrel catching rain water as he locked the door behind them, on the way to town. Remembered that they sat side by side in church, the bench creaking and unsteady beneath them. That she prayed earnestly, knuckles white, a hitch of faith almost like pain in her voice as she recited her prayers, while he went through the motions—for her—embarrassed by her fervour, cap in his hands twisting and sweating.

He broke the ice thick on the window pane, the edge of his palm scrapping aside shards and frost, and he knew Philippa would say, "Why do you do that? There's no sense to it. The view's a brick wall, Will." But she said nothing. She hovered like a shadow just beyond him, close, drawing closer, bringing with her the warmth and knowledge that here was the one person he could lean against, depend on, sag into and be tired. Getting on in years, he'd say, play with the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. Here in this damp house. We'll get a better one. I'll buy you a better one.

And still she remained butter yellow and amorphous, just a few paces behind his shoulder.

He turned.

Moonlight on the _Dutchman_'s desk.

He stood beside the wheel for a while, chasing the last of his yellow memories until they had faded into the blues and silver greys of the here and now. He gazed at his hand against the wheel.

Then stared.

A thud and the weight of aged brine alerted him to Jones's presence. Jones chuckled, low and throaty, something he pushed forward and allowed to linger between them. It built and settled over Bill's shoulders blades, creeping up his back and into his throat as Jones thudded and stumped closer. Two tentacles lifted and drew back Bill's sleeve, tossed it back down as Jones came to stand before him.

"Well, Mr Turner," he said. "Is this not a turn of events? It seems yer no longer a cursed man."


	3. The Captain and the Captain

**Chapter 3: _The Captain and the Captain_**

"Yer no longer a cursed man."

The slur and spray of salt water pockets faded from Jones' words, and the individual words, each one a small worm burrowing into his brain, began to cycle just behind Bill's eyes.

Bill. William. Sire.

William. Yes. Son. Had the coin. Gave him the coin.

But then how?

Did Barbossa find the boy? Boy was safe in—

—wait, he knew this. Land. _She_ was on land. He knew the word, the name. In-land. On-land. A collection of tall grey peaks and the coal tar sludge of industry lodged in his nostrils. Like bad news. Nothing like the clear open salt and brine and blue of the ocean. City festered in his lungs. Sea nestled within his soul, eyes windows bright. And—

—wait, he knew this. She was on land. With William, his son. Had the coin.

Did not have the coin. The curse was lifted. Moonlight did not lie. To be certain, he thrust his arm through a porthole, into the pale light of night. Flesh. Small growth of barnacles at his elbow—aye, there was still that—but undeniably flesh.

Curse lifted. Coin found.

The room shifted. Left. Right. Left again. From a distance, he knew he was casting his own gaze from one end of the room to another, could feel the grip of his own pale, wet fingers on his wrist, wringing, fretting. Pacing up and down. He stopped, stared at his arm.

In-land. On-land. The name of his home country. Where was it? And _her _name. It had been there, the night before, drawing up close behind him, taunting him. Where was her name? He trawled through the debris of the moment's urgency and the coin and the boy—his boy—to scratch and tug at the sands of her name.

A pleasant, featureless female face appeared—an impression of creams and pinks surrounded by yellow wallpaper—sitting across from him. He willed eyes, nose and lips onto that face. One blue eye, the other green.

No. No—he _knew_ her.

Blue eyes. Blue. Forget the name. Hear her voice.

"What do I tell him, Will?"

He remembered his own voice. Surely. Always so resigned, a rough edge like a violent spray of foam resigned to the path cut by a ship. "Tell him I died at sea."

Died at sea.

What did she say? Cool, dry sweet touch on his wrist.

His own hands beneath her skirt in the dark, cramped bed, holding their breaths as his palm slid between her—

But his boy was in the cot at the foot of the bed.

And Barbossa had found the boy.

A whining squeal and the pop of a stopper pulled from a bottle, and Barbossa crossed ghost legs and leaned back for a long pull. He straightened, shot his eyebrows up. "Aye," he said. "Died at sea be the truth of it. My compliments to the shadowy missus."

Bill stared. Stood with wrist in hand. Barbossa scratched below the rim of his hat.

"Get out of here!" Bill growled. "I'm not mad! I know you're not here! Not here..."

Paced, gripping his wrist still, worrying his thumb over his veins. Scratched off a carbuncle. Barbossa, he knew, was following his every move, even as he pantomimed a profound interest in the grime beneath his nails. Bill pretended not to see.

No one there. Not mad.

But the boy? His boy?

"Not mad yet," mused a second voice. "Might drive yourself there, you keep this up."

Bill stopped mid-pace. Knew that voice. Remembered that smell—the layers upon folded layers of soaked and swollen leather and congealed sweat, liquor, pipe and fire and leaf smoke, grease and—sharp above it all like teeth—sunburned flesh.

Sparrow raised a hand, twirled his fingers hullo. Flashed Bill a quick, plated smile, then Captain Jack—his Captain, his own marooned Captain—leaned across to peer at the bottle in Barbossa's hand. "Spare us a drop?" Barbossa took a swig, transferred the bottle far from Jack's reach.

"You," Bill said. Looked from Jack to Barbossa, back again. "Is you Jones wants. Always."

Jack grimaced a smile. "Charming."

Bill returned to pacing. Couldn't be bothered by Jack right now. Wringed his wrist, snapped off a tiny mollusc. Stopped to stare at Jack. "It was true, then. What you said. All those years back. About Jones and the _Pearl_. Raising it for you. It was all true."

"_I_ knew that," Barbossa said.

Jack looked surprised. "You didn't believe me, Bootsrap? _You_?" He held the surprise for a few seconds, licking his lips, as if tasting surprise and finding it mealy and undercooked. He waved his hands in a jangle of trinkets. "Forget the _Pearl_. Forget Jones! As I see it—Jones is most emphatically _not _the problem here, mate." Reached for the bottle, slid on his knees as Barbossa shifted further down their perch. Jack groped the air for a while, all manner of thoughts flapping across his face, before he settled his gaze on Bill once more. "As I see it—and correct me if I'm reading incorrectly your distress, Bootstrap—the problem here, aboard this ship, surrounded and—I might add—rudely accosted by mine and Hector's personages is—"

"Oh, don't take for_ever_!" snapped Barbossa. "William. His son. Thinks as I've murdered the lad."

"—is your wife," Jack finished.

His wife. On-land. Yes. He knew her—but it was so hard today. She receded to her extremities. Fingers. Shoulders. The sweep of her hair. And her name. Struggle. Dig deeper. What was her name?

"Mate," Jack said. "That ship's sailed. Let it be."

Not unkind. Understanding.

Bill slammed his fist against an overhead brace. "NO! Not hearin' this! You're not _here_, Captain! You're—" Face contorted in sudden, hollow realization. "...you're really dead, then?"

"Well, I can't rightly say, being as this is _your_ hallucination yet—and but—I'm obviously, unequivocally, _not_ dead."

Barbossa finished his drink, tossed the empty bottle. It shattered, crashed and tinkled across the floor.

"Don't trouble yerself in askin' if _I _be dead. Not on my account."

"And my son?" Bill turned on Barbossa. "What did you do to my son? Curse is lifted." He showed Barbossa his arm against moonlight. Not bone, but flesh. Barbossa was unimpressed. Jack gaped in horrified fascination at a row of salt-crusted lichen. Bill pulled his arm back. "Curse is lifted. You found the coin." He shuffled toward a crate, dropped onto it. "You found his coin... How?"

"_You_ don't know," Barbossa said, clipped and annoyed, "therefore _I _don't know. One supposes."

"One does," Jack said. "And even if said supposing were true, what good would it do little lad William? Or you, for that matter?"

What good.

His son. A blood debt. And Barbossa cursed a lifetime for strapping him to that thrice accursed cannon. The curse now lifted. Not by his blood.

He feared—

"Is he dead?"

Barbossa sighed in exasperation. "Already told ye! If _you _don't know—"

"In a hundred years," Jack said, a calm undercurrent to Barbossa's waves of impatience, "your truth will still be that Will is dead. Will and—"

"Her name! You _know_ her name!"

Damnable understanding. Pity for his excitement, his fool's hope. "If you don't know..."

"If I don't know. If _I don't know_! Then GO AWAY!"

Slammed his fist overhead. Harder. Crusted flesh powdered off. Averted his face.

A hand gripped his shoulder. Bill turned, eyes flashing, curses ready for his captains—

Stared into the glazed eye of a crewmember. The man—the thing, a collection of shell and coral—shoved him back. He had no lips, but Bill knew he was sneering.

"Enjoyin' yer little solitary chat, Turner?"

Said nothing. It really was the better policy. Never failed to disappoint his crewmembers. The man spat, shoved Bill away, dragged his coral feet toward the galley stair.

"Been idle enough, Turner. Get busy."

* * *

><p>His son was dead.<p>

The boy William was dead. Barbossa had killed him. Surely. Tracked down his coin, sailed to the distant and grey place that rose and buoyed within Bill's thoughts—that home: On-land, In-Land. Bill could see it all clearly, standing at the door to the gloomy, cramped house, sagging against the doorframe as the houses around him sagged into each other, and all of them a collection of tattered, grey, and tired old men. Barbossa pushed and slithered his way into their room, his wife slapped, blood on her nose, shoved to the floor, reaching butter yellow arms for the boy, the cot, the—

"Now, Bootstrap," Barbossa said. "Yer mind's playin' tricks on ye. A _cot_? Be ye forgettin' it's been ten years since I tossed you overboard? Longer 'an _that_ since ye left yer little boy?"

Bill stood aboard the _Dutchman_. He stared at Barbossa, for a few seconds, then perhaps a bit longer than that. Barbossa had followed Bill along the bowels of the ship, sat across from him now, legs crossed elegantly even as his dress would have impressed only the very back rows of a cheap theatre. The man had trailed behind Bill for days, often content to simply look, screw up his eyes into pulpy pockets of flesh, and then laugh—but also speaking, batting aside and tossing about Bill's thoughts.

"No word on that wife of yers yet? What was her name, now? Started with a..." And he'd let the idea of a letter, of her name, hang like a gallows' noose between them, anchored from Barbossa's crafty smile to the doubt and tension in Bill's eyes.

There was no getting rid of him. For fear the crew might label him mad—pitch him overboard, return him to the depths—Bill only glared in silence as the _Pearl_'s current captain sat and drank and chuckled at his expense.

Had long since given up asking him about Will.

Jack asked all the time.

He would scamper behind Barbossa, wondering out loud and at great volume how little William Turner might be faring. No answer ever came, until he simply took to peering over Barbossa's shoulder to offer what—Bill assumed—Jack construed as comfort.

"Pretty good, Barbossa. At slicing, I mean." He cast about for better words as Bill stared at him in confusion. "Throats. Quick work. Will probably didn't even suffer. So there's that to be thankful for, eh?"

Opened his mouth. Wanted to growl, "Damn you to Hell!" Caught himself in time. He pushed his way into the lower deck wall, emerged from the main mast with Barbossa and Jack trailing behind him—Barbossa disinterested, Jack with small, quiet yelps Bill could not distinguish from delight or disgust. He tossed a look back at both of them.

"It's up to you," Barbossa said conversationally. "You keep dragging around that thought that I actually killed—"

"—lovely what they've done with the place, really," Jack said. "Like the dregs of a fish barrel."

A joke. A stupid joke by his idiot young captain, but it set Bill's teeth on edge. He pushed back into the mast, felt his way blindly, wriggling, gasping in a lungful of breath as he passed from upper to lower deck and then further down, the slick flesh of the ship against his cheeks like the intestines of a giant squid. Bill emerged, covered in bile and slime, at the very bottom of the hull. No crewmembers. No light.

No one to listen or see.

He wrapped his hand around Barbossa's throat, dragged him back to slam him against a wall. Hold him there. "_Leave_," he spat.

"Yer own—thoughts—mate," Barbossa choked out.

"Then let me have them in _peace_!"

Barbossa trembled in silent laughter. "Oh, aye. In peace." He pushed back against the wall, dragging Bill's hand with him. It stuck to the wall, Bill grunting and cursing as he fought to pull it free, as Barbossa stepped back out, just shy of Bill's struggling arm. "The curse doomed ye, Mr. Turner, but the curse has been lifted. _I_ doomed ye, but ye found a way t'escape _that_ as well." He paused. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose. Folded the kerchief neatly. Stuffed it into Bill's coat pocket. "Now here be yer _real_ curse. That ye may sail these seas fer a lifetime, and never know what became of the son _ye_ involved in this whole ghastly mess."

"If he died at sea—"

"Oh, aye. And _if_ is all ye'll ever have." He patted Bill's shoulder. "But somehow I doubt it. Likely slit his throat on some island. Left him there. Rotted there."

Bill struggled, teeth bared, hair in his eyes and eyebrows knotted so fiercely he could barely see. Then, he lay still. Stood silent and wavering before he let his forehead drop against the wall, felt the wood and lichen give way for him. He pushed in, emerged beside Barbossa. Stood with his head bowed. He felt inside his coat pocket in the dark, searching for Barbossa's handkerchief. Nothing there.

"And my wife...?"

"Can't help ye there."

With that, Barbossa turned back into the wall. Bill watched as the sorry, yellowed feather of his hat disappeared. He knew it would be the last time he would see Barbossa.

A low, self-conscious cough—like a man kept waiting too long among family members he would rather not see—alerted him to the presence of Jack. He unclasped his hands—hovering in a loose tent parallel to his lower chin—and waved as Bill finally acknowledged him.

"That went rather well," Jack said.

"I doomed them, Jack. Both of them. Barbossa's right."

A spasm flashed across Jack's face. For a moment, Bill might have called it pity, even empathy. But he knew Jack better than that. It was discomfort. It was standing too close to a hunched and bowed and grey man whose words were low, heavy and hoarse with regret and pain. Bill stood alone and in despair, and these were things Jack did not care for.

Even in a hallucination.

Jack studied Bill's face. "Weren't planning on seeing them again, were you?"

"Yes," Bill said, plaintively.

This brought Jack up short. He studied Bill's face, all flickering eyes and twitching head, as if Bill's answer were scurrying about his cheeks, clambering up his lips and nose. "Oh," Jack said. He swayed, considering. Was back on his feet right quick. "Ah! But think on it. Let us suppose brave little William _is_ alive. His dear old sire—a pirate. A _wanted_ pirate. How long would _that_ be a secret, eh? Goin' ashore, as you plan? Eh?"

"I would—"

"You'd what, eh, Bootstrap? Hope they don't catch up with you? Pullin' up to port on a ship as has black sails?"

Jack caught the doubt on Bill's face, trapped it in his hands and held it. "Aye, see? You'd be a walking target. But with Will and your lady love _dead_, see. Gone. Missing. Incommunicado. Why, imagine how much easier it is for them—or, rather, not for them—that their old man is lost and bound at sea, most decidedly _not_ a merchant sailor, but a pirate?"

Jack drew closer, loomed in his sight. Midday sun and salt spray and rum laced breath filled Bill's nostrils, until he questioned whether this Jack really was a hallucination. How real was all this? It had a certain, inescapable logic. More logic than Bill could trust to himself. And all this his mirage Captain guessed at, anticipated.

"You see, Bootstrap," he said. "William Turner. They're better off dead."


	4. A Jostle of Memories

**Chapter 4: **_A Jostle of Memories_

Bill stood indecisive and shaken. Tremors along his legs and into his stomach, the jolt and churn and heave of the ship, like a waterlogged womb. Himself trapped inside. Stillborn now. Useless to everyone.

Bottle in hand.

"Married man," he told Wyvern. Knocked back a pull of rum. "Got a boy and a wife down at..." One bark of rueful laughter. "Well, I don't know where. Truth be told, I may have lost the boy. And the wife...?"Swallowed a mouthful. The flask's rim was crusted with salt, barnacles down the curved glass sides like thick ochre drops, so that now even rum was fish, fish, fish. That called for another pull, and another.

"I lost her," he rasped. "On-land. Somewhere. Don't mind losing that. But her name—I lost her name. And—and there was—she was all this yellow sunlight. Bright. And clean. And now..." Shrugged, arms lifting and falling back to his knees. "Her name," he muttered. "Can't recall her name."

Took a drink, ran his knuckles over his lips. Flick away the alcohol. Flick away the sweat and the salt water and the ocean and all the slime of fish. Useless. Could not get dry anymore. Could not get warm. Needed water. Needed drink.

"Not in a talkative mood tonight, eh?" he said. Shot Wyvern a look. Had to cast his eyes up now. The old man no longer sat at his barrel. It stood, abandoned, a worm-eaten, soggy thing cast into relief by the light of the lantern Wyvern still gripped in his hand.

Wyvern no longer had legs.

He had half a trunk, half a left shoulder. Bony clavicles jutting out of wood, leading in a curve to his right arm, held out, like a yardarm, to dangle the lantern. Muted, creamy amber light played over the hollow cheekbones and coral growths of his face. He cracked open his eyes to regard Bill patiently. Patience grew into a question, then into befuddlement.

"You're a new one," he said. His voice seemed to whisper from deep within his wooden wall.

Bill kept his eyes on Wyvern's. "Aye," he said. "I'm new." Almost held out the flask, tempted to repeat his offer of so many days (weeks) (months) (it was hard to keep track) ago, "Do you drink?"

This Wyvern did not drink. Had already closed his eyes again, thick cracks and pops following the shift of his shoulders as he settled further into the wall. Bill sat and drank and watched as spongy splinters of wood threaded themselves through Wyvern's arms, what remained of his torso. He thought about what it would feel like to the touch, what remained of the old man's flesh. He swayed as he stood, bottle in his left hand, right outstretched. Stumbled, so that he had to steady himself against the wall—against Wyvern's knobby left shoulder.

Wet wood. Waterlogged and swollen, slick with slime and moss. Bill squeezed, and saw that his fingers had made indentations into the man's flesh. Squeezed harder, eyes fixed on Wyvern's face. The lamp swung from his hand, patient and muted, as Bill dug his fingernails into the man's shoulder, lifted and pried back splinters and wood shavings that curled into soggy springs. They fell at his feet. He stared at them, bottle dangling limply in his hand. At length, he took a long pull of rum and allowed his body to drop back against the wall.

"Headed there," Bill said. Pointed the tip of his bottle at Wyvern's nose, rum sloshing within as his hand shook. "Headed where you're going, old man. Rotting. Rotting and drowning and—" Heaved in a deep breath. Something seemed to be sticking in his throat, and he swallowed it down. Tamped it down and kept it there even as his voice wavered. "And—and—god_damn_ it! I don't _want_ to forget her name! But she's gone, don't y'see? _Gone_!" Waved his arms in a wide arc. Heard the bottle smash to the ground, glass crunching and scratching beneath his feet, his voice catching. "I'm going to forget her..." he sobbed. "Can't recall her name..."

Wyvern's eyes took in the bottle shards, the barrel, the hunched figure that was Bill, shoulders rising and falling in hiccupping jerks as he continued to sob. It was a low, keening sound, like warped, mirthless laughter. "Whom did you forget...?" Wyvern murmured. "Perhaps we could... you and I... remember. Together." He cast furtive glances about the room, shrank back into his wooden frame. "But no. No. Part of this ship. Others hear. See. _He _hears and sees. All. Sees all. Knows all. No good. Will steal our thoughts away. Best forget," he murmured, a father confessor to an errant son. "Best forget."

Bill stayed as he was, bent, the salt of his skin mingled with the salt of tears. They ran into his mouth and joined the brine and rum and he didn't even bother to wipe them away. No one to see. No one to judge. Just him—William Turner the Father—and Wyvern. Part of the ship. And he cradled one small thought to him at that moment, something quiet and steady and numbing.

Jack was right. Jack, his captain. Jack who was most likely dead, starved to bones on the island where Barbossa had marooned him. Dead like his wee William and the buttery yellow wife hovering at the corners of his mind. Faint now, like fading winter light. She receded into mists, evaporated as he turned to look for her one last time.

Better off dead.

Forgotten.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. "I tried, love. But it's for the best. I'm a forsaken man. Does your memory no good to be tied to the likes of me."

Ran a hand under his nose, coughing out the last of his discomposure. He gazed at the shards of his bottle and the spilled—wasted—rum for a long, silent while, swaying a little on his knees. At length, he pushed back onto his feet, hands slapping his thighs as he straightened. Took a deep breath, then another.

"What will you do?" Wyvern said.

Bill startled. He frowned in thought, casting his eyes about the lower deck, suddenly acutely aware of how hunched and wet, old and pathetic he must look—even to Wyvern. "Dunno," he muttered. "Something to do. Somewhere."

"Always something to do," Wyvern nodded.

"Yeah. Always something to do when you got nowhere to go."

* * *

><p>"Bootstrap!" said Jack.<p>

Bill crowned the last heap of cannonballs on the larderside. Took one long, careful look at his Captain. The longer he looked—Jack standing at a gently heaving ease, a human ship sailing wooden waters, beatific, expectant half-smile on his lips—the more Bill's confusion grew. Capped by a rueful sigh, shoulders drooping in resignation.

"Why are you still here, Jack? Had me an episode. Can't you go away?"

"Would if I could, mate. But as it's your—"

"Yes. I know. _My_ hallucinations. You're blameless." Took up a moss slick rope, pulled open a hatch. A rope ladder dropped down, stiff and white with salt. He descended half-way, hopped off to land with a splash beside the first of the triple guns. Heard Jack splash down behind him. Heard him tumble.

"Still doesn't tell me _why_ you're still hanging about," Bill grunted, the weight of a cannonball against his stomach. Had busied himself with the back and forth of choosing cannonballs from a crate, hoisting them in his arms, and piling them into a pyramid, ready for the next crew chosen to die at sea.

More jumpers from among the crew, then, Bill mused. New recruits to replace them.

"No honour to be had on this ship," Bill muttered.

"None at all," Jack agreed. He had stretched out on a hammock, legs crossed at the ankles. "And to answer your question of not too long ago, I can't say as I can tell you _why _I'm hangin' 'bout." He removed his hat and dropped it over his stomach, settled back. "'Course... one thing does come to mind..."

Picked up a cannonball. Hoisted it up. Placed it on the pile. Repeat.

"There was... a memory," Bill said.

Jack dug his thumbnail into the nail of his ring finger, brows furrowed as he displaced dirt and grit before chewing on it. "That?" he said distractedly. "Oh, that's flown. And very smartly and rightly so, I might add. Best course of action for _all_ involved, mate. _You _don't get to beat yerself up, and _I_ don't have to witness it and we're all happy!" He clapped his hands, pushing out a short, nervous laugh, as if pushing aside a scandalous dinner topic best left alone. "No. No, that's most emphatically _not_ what comes to my mind, Mr. Turner."

Picked up a new cannonball. Hoisted it up. Placed it on the pile.

Repeated it three times.

Started a fourth, his spine tingling from exposure, ghost eyes of a ghost Jack following him back and forth, no doubt. Shot him a glance across his shoulder. Laid out on the hammock, fingers laced behind his mess of matted hair, eyes firmly on a thick cluster of mussels. Bill hoisted the fourth cannonball.

"Stood up for ya."

"Did you? Did I hear of this?"

Paused. Placed the cannonball on the pile. "Cursed the rest of the crew for ya."

"Really?"

"Made it so they wouldn't find my coin."

"But they did."

Boots slapping wood as he picked up speed between choosing, hoisting, piling, sweating. "Did my best, Captain."

"And I don't doubt it." Conversational. Just like the young Captain Jack. But beneath the calm of that tone, the undercurrent. The sliver of danger that put him above Bill. Peel the bright green tone back, and you had the bitter black fruit to bite. Bill flicked perspiration off his upper lip.

"When they did it—"

"Where were you?" Jack scratched his neck, nail of his index finger scrapping against his Adam's apple. Scritch _scritch_ scritch. The sound followed Bill as he worked, as he willed the monotony of pick, sweat, hoist, stump _stump_, place, exhale to vanish ghost Jack.

No such luck. Still on the hammock. Still on track.

"Where _were_ you, Mr Turner, when Barbossa and the rest started it all? Were you standing up for me, as they readied their weapons? Running forward?" Jack mimed a ponsy half-run. "No! Don't! Not to our captain!" Dropped his hands on his thighs. "Do you have a memory like that? Or was it more like—"

"Below deck," Bill said. Too low. Aimed at his chest.

Just like—

"Below deck?" said Jack. "Well fat load of good _that_ did me, did it?"

Too low, and aimed at his chest. "S'not right." So that Barbossa barely paid attention. "Jack's our captain." Low and troubled as louder, stronger voices muttered, "Pro'lly plans tah stiff us of da treasure" and "We has no bearings 'cause there _be_ no comin' back!" and "Not right in the 'ead, that one." Barbossa shoving a pistol against his chest.

"Ye join this mutiny, Mr Turner, or I'll be havin' some words t'say 'bout it."

"Like keelhaul?" said Jack.

The words didn't matter, in the end.

"Cheer up, Bootstrap!" Barbossa called from above, from a great and fractured height. Bill jostled and bumped and scrapped raw skin across the deck boards—palms red, peeled and bloodied from a useless, frantic attempt to arrest movement—ears full of the hoarse groan of the ropes and the dead, aborted bumps of the cannon wheels against the _Pearl_'s deck. Barbossa and the black sails above heaved, a loud crack and the drum pound of the wheels clearing deck, smashing against the ship's side. Sky and sea merged—one long fractured yawn of blue as the back of his head smashed against the side of the ship, blinded him for one instant of panic and motion, speed and dread—and from above and below, Barbossa's voice, "These things tend not t'take _too_ long!"

"It didn't, you know," Bill said. Placed the last cannonball on its heap, sat with his back against the triple cannon's wheel. "Dropping was quick. Sky, the _Pearl_, the slap of the waves. I remember—still feel... sometimes, the bite of the cannon's lip, just below my ribs ...as I was dragged down. I would've laughed, you know. That they hadn't figured it out yet, that we were all cursed. Served us right. Served us all right. Deserved it. And it was quick." Worried at the veins on his wrist. "Sinking took a bit longer..."

He licked his lips. Exhaled.

"I didn't do enough by you, Jack."

"There! See?" Jack hopped off the hammock. "Always a reason!" Sauntered toward Bill to clap a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was all fat heavy rings and leather, beads and cotton bandage. Beneath it, a warm, rough palm. Odd what one recalled, of the missing.

"_Are_ you, Jack...?"

"Mm?"

"Dead?"

"Mate—been through this."

Bill nodded. "Almost given up now," he said.

Jack paused half-way through his exit through a wall. "Come again?"

"Her name. It may not be... doesn't have to be..."

"Does it? Abandoned her too, didn't you?" Flash of capped teeth in a smile. "Say—yer good at that. One wonders why she's failed to grace your fevered visions with her feminine presence despite yer noble decisions." Jack dipped one hand through the wall, took one wide, careful step forward into the rotted wood. "Ever thought of that?"

And with that, Jack was gone. Quick. Not long at all. Like a blinding slap of water, and Bill had dropped into the sea once more, all those years past. Could see it clearly in his mind's eye. Swallowed. Fate decided on a moment's indecision. Didn't think it was right, muttered into his chest. So he sank to the bottom.

Sinking took longer than the drop.

Running out of air, not much longer than that.

And then, it was just him and his thoughts.

The first thought was of death. His own death. A scenario he'd visited before, of course. One didn't join a pirate crew for one's long lasting health. One didn't willingly sail the seas without death in a pocket.

The thought was now of how long.

All of his involuntary spasms had gone into the sinking. Struggling, feet kicking—gotta get the boots off, _gotta get the boots off_—his mind a wide white blank of panic. He screamed, uselessly, filled his lungs with sea water.

Still he continued to sink. He went limp, spent and dazed, and half-watched as clear blue waters deepened into dirty blue into grey and into preternatural night and, finally, into perpetual half-darkness. The cannon wheels came to rest on the sand with the slow and faltering urgency of the elderly.

The barrel—and his body—remained straight for some time. Air trapped within the barrel. Air trapped within Bill. The sudden jerk of the barrel dropping down jolted him into full consciousness again. Gasped in some more sea water, struggled as he found he could not choke. Sank to the sandy bottom so slowly it almost made him laugh. Maybe he did laugh. More water into his lungs. Then he hit ground.

He lay still.

He had sunk. Was already dying. Could feel his heart tightening, squeezing, left side numb, until he was reduced to the waves of pressure on his chest and lungs and temples, pulsing a vice grip that left him light-headed and giddy. His heart beat within his ears. Building, building, pressure and his heartbeat growing louder and louder and deafening.

That didn't last very long either.

And, once it passed, a strange sense of calm settled over Bill.

That was that, then. His heart and lungs had given up.

Other thoughts vied for consideration then. Sharks. His own flesh. Eyesight. Aye. Eyesight. Could he see anything? This amused him for a while, kept his mind clear of sharks. For he _could _see. The bottom of the sea, it turned out, was somewhat like a grey, rocky Scottish countryside, all soft hills and crags and jotting rocks. All decomposing, falling bit by bit into pockmarks, colonized by hundreds of tiny creatures. Bill knew they were there, could not make them out. Tendrils, undulating, swaying. Crusted shells. Fish, he supposed. Coral. Things that scuttled and darted.

Persistent above it all drifted the tendrils of his own hair. Kept catching on his nose, his mouth, his lashes. Could not move his arms, pinned back and double lashed at the wrists. Could not move his head for the pressure of the water.

Amusement faded fast.

He drifted in and out. Couldn't call it sleep. Blacked out. Always the same view to greet him when he came to. Immobile and silent in the depths, he felt as all sense of time and space faded, lost meaning, until he understood himself to be as smooth and featureless as waterlogged wood. Coated in the slick, slimy patina of the ocean, slippery and pale as a fish. Yet unable to move to swim to dart. Held motionless. Just him and the cannon and immense time.

Time passed. He had no way to measure it. Decay was slow and patient on the ocean floor. Everything remained constant.

Thoughts cycled and re-cycled.

The mutiny. Jack a panicked, hoarse, shouting figure on a tiny island receding into the horizon.

"Ah, Jack," Barbossa said. "No dignity." Snapped his spyglass shut. "I trust ye've squared yer conscience, Bootstrap."

"Aye," he said. Dull and subservient. Cringing into a stoop as Barbossa snapped, "Aye, _Captain_, ye festerin' wound—or ye can swim out to dear Jack right 'ere an' now!"

His thoughts cycled back to that moment often, cycled back to standing below deck, muttering into his chest. "S'not right." Cycled again and got caught in the one moment that tasted clear.

The letter to his son. To _her_.

The moment when all the weeks before, asking, talking up sailors at port, eavesdropping, crystallized.

"Dat be dem. Dem what's got d'cursed gold."

"Wouldn't be them f'r all the treasure in this're world."

They'd cross and triple cross themselves at sight of the _Pearl _and its crew. Spat. Warded off the evil eye.

"I've heard of a curse," Bill would say, casual, just wondering out loud. "On the _Black Pearl_." And some would walk away, shove him aside, spit at him. Some—all gummed and blackened teeth—would take a great deal of pleasure out of detailing his gruesome fate.

Dead and hollow and decaying for all eternity.

The others suspected. Most blinded themselves to it. Precious few bothered themselves about Bill. Quiet. Taciturn. Jumpy. They thought they understood. Guilt over Jack. Regret. Resentment. They spat on him too. But they didn't know.

Bill knew. Had found out days ago, held it close around him, sheltered beneath his stoop and his startled gazes. One coin. One solitary coin, and the knowledge gained from a trader come up from the Spanish colonies.

"Gather th'treasure. Repay th'blood. All them what sail on 'em _Black Pearl_. Lift th'curse."

Clear as mud, all deeds of dirt.

He felt no guilt, then, no remorse. His mind was clear. Dropped the coin into an envelope, wrote home, to England. A gift. The wording of the letter he could no longer recall, only a lingering sense of excitement and urgency.

"Wasn't right," he said that night, during dinner at the crew's mess. "What we did to Jack." Said it clearly. They all heard. Hauled him up to Barbossa's cabin, had him repeat it.

"Wasn't right. The mutiny. Marooning him."

Barbossa was all blue eyes, parsed by memory into the impression of a face at the end of a long, blurred tunnel.

"Have I heard ye right, William Turner?"

It was his moment of triumph. His clear moment of strength and conviction and honour. Stood straight. Stood proud.

"Get this maggot off my ship!"

Strange triumph. Strapped by his bootstraps to a cannon.

Suspended at the bottom of the sea. And all his time cycling and recycling and recycling and re-writing. Mutinied. Did not mutiny. Defended Jack. Kept quiet. Lifted the curse. Let it lie. Out of spite. Out of revenge. On them. On Barbossa.

And, of course, on himself.

Damn him for a fool.


End file.
